Do Backyard Chickens Save You Money?

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Chicken chatter is in the air once again, with the price of eggs and their breaking of budgets making the complaint circuit on social media. If eggs are so expensive, then why not just raise your own chickens? After all, many municipalities already allow a few backyard chickens, and how hard can it be, anyway?

I raised chickens for years and years, including small backyard flocks and large farm flocks, so it got me wondering -- do they really save you money?

For us, owning chickens ranged from a whimsical decision to a practical one -- on the farm we sold chicks to the neighbors, and composted their droppings for the vegetable garden. In the city, it was just nice to kind of keep that same rhythm as we had on the farm, albeit at a much smaller scale.

Plus, chickens are interesting pets -- so long as they live outside.

Which came first?

There are a few things you need to make an egg, the most important being a female chicken. But having a female chicken isn't enough -- you must feed her and house her, too. She needs water and, often, electricity to heat the coop through the winter. Although just a couple of chickens will be perfectly happy in a doghouse with a very large run, housing for a chicken can be as simple or as elaborate as you want to make it.

Most of the time, when you buy a chicken, it's a baby chicken, because, frankly, they're cute, and also they're easy to ship. You might be able to get adult chickens locally, but there is a ton of variability at that point, and a lot of questions about disease status and age, since chickens go through various periods of more and less egg production in their lives.

So, let's talk about baby chickens.

To buy a baby chicken, you're going to drop $4 to $6 or so at Tractor Supply Co. or your nearest hatchery. I grew up in Lebanon, Missouri, so when I owned chickens, nothing but the famous Cackle Hatchery would do. But if you don't want to ship your babies, Tractor Supply Co. will work in a pinch.

But you can't just buy one chick, they must have friends, so make sure you're prepared to take at least three home. Assuming you've begged, borrowed, or stolen the things you'll need to raise baby chicks at home, the biggest recurring expenses you'll have are food and bedding.

What does it cost to make an egg?

Chicken feed for babies costs almost nothing because they're babies who weigh less than a wiffle ball. But as they grow, the food bill grows, and did I mention that they won't lay their first egg for several months, or longer if you start them in the fall? You can expect four or five months of feeding birds that are hapless layabouts.

Food for chickens varies based on their life stage, but let's focus on layer feed, which is what you'll mostly feed your birds for the rest of their lives. A 25-pound bag of feed costs about $15.50 directly from Purina (your local feed store may be cheaper). For a full-grown, average laying hen, that's about 100 days of meals at $0.15 a day, or about $13.50 per month for three.

Bedding is also not so bad, depending on what you choose. I always used pine horse bedding because I could later spread it around my plants as mulch. An eight cubic foot bag of that runs about $15.

How much you'll need will depend heavily on your coop size, but assuming you just have three birds and you change or add a new layer of bedding every two weeks to a doghouse-sized coop, you might have four to six bedding changes in that bag (the more you use, to a point, the better you'll keep the smell down). So, bedding, let's say, is $2.50 every 14 days.

So, for three birds, for a month of existing with basic needs, you've spent about $18.90 so far. A chicken can lay one egg every 25 hours if she's really going strong (much fewer in the winter, depending on the breed). So for a lovely month of June, you'll get about 86 eggs between your young trio, or about seven dozen eggs. This may go down to as few as zero eggs in the winter, though.

For June, it's not bad at all -- about $2.70 per dozen. The Federal Reserve's most recent measure of average egg prices was $3.08 per dozen.

Other costs for chickens

$2.70 per dozen is a great price for pasture-raised, cruelty-free eggs, there's no doubt about it. But that's not all there is to pay for. Your hens will need to be dewormed, they'll need veterinary care, you'll have additional costs from watering them and keeping them warm in the winter. Plus, you'll pay for their house, their fencing, and their feeders.

So, do backyard chickens save you money? Maybe. If you already have their care and feeding in your budget, raising your own hens can help offset fluctuations in egg prices that even Costco isn't immune to, but you also have to consider that your time is worth something.

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